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Thursday, 8 November 2012

RULES

After being unpleasantly surprised at how poor the Grants' wargame rules were for my purposes..despite the rosy nostalgic glow of half-remembered battle reports..I now have the pleasant revelation of what had been lurking on my bookshelves all along was in fact golden.
Charlie Wesencraft's Pike and Musket and Practical Wargaming are streets ahead even of some rules today.
Combat results tables, variable sequence game turns, multi-scale games, variable troop quality, terrain redefined for different scale games..etc.

Donald Featherstone's Advanced Wargames fails to contend with Practical Wargaming because it imagines that addressing the details of how a specific task is accomplished ..using an analogue calculaor to calculate casualties, for example, is an advance - whereas CW examines the logic of the gaming process and how it relates to reality (or the version we want on a tabletop) before then devising an appropriate mechanism.
It is also rather annoying to have paid so much(£17.95) for the chance to feel foolish in overlooking CW as a pathfinder for creating the type of rules I want for this project.